Power Hold'em Strategy by Daniel Negreanu Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Power Hold'em Strategy
Book Review: Daniel's view on hold'em is great, rest is poop.
Summary: 4 Stars
Negreanu's section on "small-ball" has helped my tournament play greatly. Although, if you do not have the discipline to play in position, give up hands to resistance, and avoid big pots with small hands you're going to take a beating playing with a "Small Ball" style. Also, it is difficult to apply it to poorly structured tourneys where you don't have the chips to make numerous moves over a long period of time.
The small ball style that Negreanu shows you will open up your play without taking huge risks, and develop a style that will get you paid off on your huge hands without it being obvious that you have the best of it. It also allows you to take advantage of your greatest edge when you are playing lesser experienced players, post-flop play with a confused opponet. While negating the novice players greatest edge, pre-flop aggression with small odds advantages.
A word of advise though, skip straight to Daniel's small ball section, the ~350 pages leading up to it is basically a mix of crap and regurgitated concepts. Davids Williams section on "Mixing it up" is especially craptacular, and while he did a good job I have to imagine that they could have found someone better than Todd Brunson to write a section on high stakes cash games. Basically the only other portion of the book with any value is 3 pages by Brunson titled "Dealing with Mega-Loss".
Book Review: Excellent, if only for the one chapter
Summary: 4 Stars
The reason to buy this book is, as others have related, for Daniel's chapter on small-ball. I don't know if the others chapters are good or bad, as I got it after reading reviews on 2+2 forums and simply skipped straight to that chapter.
I'd been playing mostly a Harrington on Holdem, tight-aggressive style, especially early in tournaments when there seems to be little in the pot worth fighting over. That approach had me coming to the middle or end of tournaments with average to slightly below average stacks and needing to make good use of the M charts and figuring out when to just shove.
With just my first few tournaments using some small-ball ideas, I've been coming into the middle and end of tournaments at or near the chip lead. Those early pots that don't seem worth fighting over are the ones that are so easy to take down. I've noticed that many people realize that you're raising so often that you can't always have a hand and are sometimes willing to call your small raises. This is even better because those same people are just as willing to lay down their marginal hands when the flop misses them (and likely me too) when I make a nice little continuation bet. Not only are you picking up the blinds, you're picking up the chips from the people who called your raise and fold on the flop probably 75% of the time. You just fold when you get played back at too much...or you crush them when you flop a real hand and they get completely blindsided.
I've been rarely calling raises and NEVER limping. It's basically either raise or fold. The only time I'll call a raise from in front of me is when I'm mining for a set. Even then, if I don't hit it, I'm in position and can often win when it's checked to me. Because I'm playing small-ball and in a lot of pots, people realize I could have almost anything and, because I have a lot of chips, are scared to play back at me. And I haven't even finished going through the entire chapter yet. LOL
Basically I think small-ball is about winning a lot of small pots with small bets that don't incur much risk to your stack, then winning huge pots when you get played back at when you actually have the goods. In that way I guess it's basically a loose-aggressive style which minimizes risk.
Even having read just most of the Negreanu chapter, it's been well worth the money.
Book Review: Finally a book about "small ball"...
Summary: 4 Stars
I am going to say essentially what everyone else on here has been saying... If you buy this book, know that you can use the chapters not written by Negreanu as toilet paper or kindling for your fireplace. What you are buying this book for is Negreanu's explanation of "small ball" NL tournament poker. I noticed from reading the other reviews that everyone else is similarly interested in small ball, and have found this strategy to be quite effective. I also noticed that one guy on here seems to think Daniel is advocating a "weak, passive" approach to playing poker. This is far, far from the truth. Either he didn't read the book well enough, or is just not intelligent enough to get what Daniel was trying to communicate. Here are some basic ideas behind the small-ball philosophy:
1) Keep the pots small, pre-flop. You don't want to put a lot of your chips at risk before you even see the flop. Your aces may get busted by deuces post-flop, and you'll be pot committed after a few big bets. Not good. Instead, you wait to see the flop, then evaluate the situation based on what your opponent is doing. By keeping the pots small, you will pick up more pots that people don't really care about after the flop and not risk getting drawn out on by some crazy donk.
2) Play lots of hands that have big post-flop potential. That means opening up your starting hand selection by a large amount. This has been a big adjustment for me, but by doing so I have learned a lot about how to play poker in general. I have won a lot of big pots in tournaments and deep-stacked cash games by calling raises with mediocre hands that turn into monsters post-flop. Daniel expounds on which hands to call with under which set of circumstances.
3) Don't let your opponents get a good read on you. By playing your big hands the same as you do your weak hands, it makes it very hard for your opponents to know what you are playing with. It forces players into a guessing game, and if you are fairly decent at reading other people's hands, you can make some really good plays.
4) Playing the texture of the board. A good amount of Daniel's small ball approach deals with making decisions based on the texture of the board. This is something that is key to any poker player's success, I think. You don't always have to have the best hand to end up with the chips.
Those are some main aspects to playing small ball that Negreanu pays a great deal of attention to. What I've noticed for myself and other players is that the people who consistently do well in poker tournaments rely on more than luck and aggression. They rely on skill and discipline. I think this book will help you in both areas, if you aren't a small ball player already.
Book Review: Flushstrator
Summary: 4 Stars
Danny, I'm coming after you boy!! Its a good book, but the majority of it was written by other players. Danny doesn't give up too many secretesBook Review: Good Stuff In Here
Summary: 4 Stars
I've notice a lot of the complaints here are from players who seem to have read every other poker book, and there's nothing wrong with that, but one has to realize the more you read about a particular subject, the more 'recycled material' you are going to come across. Was this book perfect? Absolutely not. Did it have a lot of good information in it? Absolutely. I've read the Super System's, and a few other books, and didn't feel like everything I had read in PHS was just 'reahashed material'. As a matter of fact, I think it fits in well with the Super System's as a 'compliment' or extension.